Flight of the Navigator (1986)

*Flight of the Navigator* follows 12-year-old David, who blacks out in 1978 and walks home to find it is now 1986 — he hasn't aged a day, yet eight years have passed. That vanished stretch is the very heart of real abduction lore: "missing time"^[1]. The craft is imagined as a silver, mirror-surfaced pod that reshapes itself on command, flown by a shipboard intelligence called Max that had downloaded a star atlas straight into the boy's brain^[3]. On a late–Cold War screen it extends the post–*Close Encounters* line in which alien contact means wonder, not invasion — handing the UFO back to children.